DRAGONHEART
A film review by Jonathan B. Hardison
Copyright 1996 Jonathan B. Hardison
All throughout Rob Cohen's picture, DRAGONHEART, I found myself trying to think of ways to make ASCII thumbs up/thumbs down symbols. Ultimately, out of sheer confusion, I gave up.
DRAGONHEART is the story of a Young Prince who becomes King when his father is killed in a peasant revolt. Out of the prince's greed for the crown, he is actidentally mortally wounded by a young girl falling from a hut. In desperation to save the new King, his mother and this Teacher, Bowen (Dennis Quaid), take him to an old dragon, who revives the boy by giving him half of his heart. In this exchange, the dragon makes him swear not to be a tyrant like his father, which slightly resembles Bowen's teachings in the first five minutes of the film. When the boy grows up to be a tyrant, Bowen feels that the dragon polluted the boy with his evil heart, and sets out to kill all dragons in order to avenge his (for lack of a better term) "wonderful" teachings. Later, we also discover that the dragon is condemned to "dragon hell" because he gave life to such a tyrant (can't you tell I love saying "tyrant"?) Along the way the dragon befriends Bowen after a fight ending in a mental, if not physical stalemate; the young woman who wounded the prince initally wants revenge on the prince for the death of her father, and then on everyone else in the film for the same reason (even though she befriends Bowen); Bowen changes his loyalties from the Dragon to himself to King Arthur (Arthur??) multiple times; Bowen and the dragon (oh, by the way, did I fail to mention the voice of the Dragon in Sean Connery?) lead a peasant revolt (yes, again) agaist the prince; a poet/monk/scholar finds out he can shoot anyone in any embarassing place on the body with an arrow; and along the way we learn about the values of truth, loyalty, forgiveness, honor, religion, parental upbrining, good hygine, and cooking.
Still with me? Good.
And this is exactly what pulls down DRAGONHEART, the story. The writers tried to pack every shred of, well, everything into this movie. There are enough plot points in this film to feul the rest of the writers for three or four summers to come. The story is just so silly that we tend to forget about it halfway through and just concentrate on watching the Dragon, which is, of course, the point of this film.
As for the dragon, the attention to detail and the improvements in CGI rendering (the same computer animation that brought us JURASSIC PARK) really come through in this film for an eyeful of a dragon. One scene with the dragon standing in the rain with water dripping off of him is technically stunning. Just so, the film turns out just to be a vehicle for the special effects and Sean Connery's humorous interpretaion of the dragon. Connery makes the dragon the only really likeable (or understandable) character in this film. Regardless of how bad the story is, the dragon is fun to watch.
For this reason, I have to give DRAGONHEART a little better rating than it deserves. No ground is broken here in the acting or in the directing (by Rob Cohen), but as a vehicle for a visually stunning dragon, this movie delivers. Of course, you could have made a film about people dusting teapots interesting by inserting a well executed computer generated dragon (interesting characters would do the same) Next time, a coherent plot and a couple of characters are in order, and I'll have mine Flambe'.
DRAGONHEART **1/2
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